What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [2]
Google is the first post-media company. Unlike Yahoo, Google is not a portal. It is a network and a platform. Google thinks in distributed ways. It goes to the people. There are bits of Google spread all over the web. About a third of Google’s revenue—expected to total $20 billion in 2008—is earned not at Google.com but at sites all over the internet. Here’s how they do it: The Google AdSense box on the home page of my blog, Buzzmachine.com, makes me part of Google’s empire. Google sends me money for those ads. Google sends me readers via search. Google benefits by showing those readers more of its ads, which it can make more relevant, effective, and profitable because it knows what my site is about. I invited Google in because Google helps me do what I want to do.
I, in turn, help spread Google by putting its ads on my page and by embedding its YouTube videos, Google Maps, and Google search box on my blog. When I link to a page on the internet, I help Google understand what that page is about and how popular it is. I make Google smarter. With our clicks and links, we all do. Google is clever enough to organize that knowledge and take advantage of it. It exploits the wisdom of the crowd, and thereby respects us in the crowd. Google trusts us (well, most of us, except those damned spammers—but then Google has ways to ferret out the evil few among us). Google realizes that we are individuals who live in an almost infinite universe of small communities of interest, information, and geography. Google does not treat us as a mass. Google understands that the economy is made up of a mass of niches—that small is the new big. Google does not see itself as a product. It is a service, a platform, a means of enabling others that so far knows no limits.
As hard as it is to imagine today, Google could fail. It could grow too gangly to operate efficiently (I’ve heard rumblings from insiders that it’s getting harder to accomplish things quickly because the company is just so huge). It could grow so dominant that government regulators try to break it up. In 2008, the U.S. Justice Department hired a top litigator to investigate Google’s deal to serve ads on Yahoo and its dominance of the advertising market (though it should be noted that Google gained that position with the eager acquiescence of Yahoo, newspapers, and ad agencies). Google could also grow so big that it becomes hard to grow bigger; that’s already becoming the case. Google could lose our trust the moment it misuses the data it has about us or decides to use our growing dependence on it as a chokehold to charge us (as cable companies, phone companies, and airlines do). It could lose its way or just screw up. When Gmail had a rare moment of dysfunction, Google CEO Eric Schmidt reminded the world, “We’re not perfect.”
So don’t get hung up on trying to be Google, on mimicking what Google does. This book is about more than Google and its own rules and about more than technology and business. It’s about seeing the world as Google sees it, finding your own new worldview, and seeing differently. In that sense, this isn’t a book about Google. It’s a book about you. It is about your world, how it is changing for you, and what you can gain from that. It is hard to name an industry or institution—advertisers, airlines, retailers, auto makers, auto dealers, consumer-products brands, computer companies, fashion designers, telephone companies, cable operators, political candidates, government leaders, university educators—that should not be asking: What would Google do?
I will help you answer that question for your own world in the next section of this book, interpreting the wisdom of Google’s ways as a set of rules to live and do business